The Author Discovers History And Identity To Be Fundamentally Fluid

The phrase "a novel" has been hastily pasted on the galley of V.S. Naipaul's "A Way in the World"-clearly an afterthought and an inaccuracy as well. Perhaps no term to pigeonhole this book has yet been coined, but it does not look very much like a novel.

What it first resembles is "The Diary of a Writer," a periodical that Dostoevsky published intermittently in the 1870s and that contained a smorgasbord of his diverse obsessions, political opinions, reactions to news of the day, portraits of contemporary figures both notorious and unknown, notes for stories, fragments of novels, scraps of memoir and so on. Naipaul's book is similar to Dostoevsky's magazine in its catholic inclusion of many disparate kinds of writing, but unlike "The Diary of a Writer," "A Way in the World" has clearly been conceived as a whole and organized to produce, if not precisely a single unified impression, an organized matrix of related impressions. That means that Naipaul's book is not something less than a novel but something quite different, perhaps something more.

"A Way in the World" is divided into nine sections, which are discontinuous in the conventional sense, although there is much repetition of themes and motifs among them. It is difficult to understand their relationship as parts of a sequential narrative flow, easier to comprehend them as a composition of different elements arranged like panels in a painting.

Part 2 ("History: A Smell of Fish Glue") and Part 9 ("Home Again") read very much like personal memoir. Parts 1 ("Prelude: An Inheritance"), 4 ("Passenger: A Figure From the Thirties"), 5 ("On the Run") and 7 ("A New Man") also contain an element of memoir but tend to focus more closely on some personality other than Naipaul's own-sometimes private individuals, sometimes political or literary figures; these sections sometimes look a little like notes for different biographies. Parts 3 ("New Clothes"), 6 ("A Parcel of Papers, A Roll of Tobacco, A Tortoise") and 8 ("In the Gulf of Desolation") are each subtitled "An Unwritten Story." In the opening of the first, Naipaul observes:

"Some writing ideas go cold on you when you try to work them out on the page. Other ideas you simply play with in your mind, and don't do more about, perhaps because you know you won't get far. Most of these unattempted ideas fade; but one or two can stay with you. This is an account of an idea that has stayed."

"New Clothes" is a summary account of an anonymous latterday revolutionist trying to organize the Amerindians of Guyana; at its close, the revolutionist is presented with clothing that one Indian has reserved against the day when he will enter the proper civilization to wear it: a Tudor doublet, 300 years old.

That doublet might have been a relic of Sir Walter Raleigh's last expedition to the New World, which is given a strikingly unsympathetic presentation in "A Parcel of Papers," as Raleigh searches the Orinoco River for illusory El Doradian gold mines (in whose existence he no longer himself believes) that might have spared him the execution he finally sails to meet in England.

Finally, "The Gulf of Desolation," the longest and most fully rendered of these three fictional fragments, summarizes the career of a lesser-known historical player, Francisco Miranda, an early Venezuelan proponent of Spanish-American revolution who spent most of his life campaigning for support in various nations of Europe. In 1806, after 35 years abroad, he makes a half-hearted attempt at an invasion and is repelled and marooned on Naipaul's own island of origin, Trinidad. Three years later he joins Simon Bolivar's revolution, is captured in its collapse and finally dies a Spanish prisoner in Cadiz.

Admirers of Naipaul's marvelous fiction may find these three episodes somewhat frustrating; one partly wishes that he had actually written these stories instead of sketching them, for each could make a terrific full-length novel on its own. The Miranda story, especially, is ideal for a novelist of Naipaul's great gifts.

However, Naipaul's ambitions here are different, as he shows in his reaction to a bloody insurrectional battle in the Trinidad government building where he worked as a youth. The futility of the deaths involved smothers the promise of the first post-colonial wave of black liberation with the smell of blood (a sensory image that Naipaul fuses with the odor of the fish-glue binding the documents he handled as a clerk).

There is something more to the situation than a simple betrayal of the black political euphoria he identifies as "the sacrament of the square":